[Marxism] Democrats join Bush in kvetching about N Korea test, but "strategic jolt" is for real

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is a serious blow to the prospects for an effective anti-Iran
front, and registers that the war against the axis of evil has brought
about a shift in the relationship of forces to the detriment of US
imperialism. The serious pressures on the Morales regime in  Bolivia
represent a vulnerability for the working-class side.  How the Morales
government, Venezuela, and Cuban can respond to this may be at least as
important for the strengthening of the working-class and peasant
position in the conflicts.
Fred Feldman
 
October 10, 2006
News Analysis

For U.S., a Strategic Jolt After North Korea's Test 

By
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/david_e_sa
nger/index.html?inline=nyt-per> DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Oct. 9 -
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritorie
s/northkorea/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> North Korea may be a starving,
friendless, authoritarian nation of 23 million people, but its
apparently successful explosion of a small nuclear device in the
mountains above the town of Kilju on Monday represents a defiant bid for
survival and respect. For Washington and its allies, it signifies a
failure of nearly two decades of atomic diplomacy. 

North Korea is more than just another nation joining the nuclear club.
It has never developed a weapons system it did not ultimately sell on
the world market, and it has periodically threatened to sell its nuclear
technology. So the end of ambiguity about its nuclear capacity
foreshadows a very different era, in which the concern may not be where
a nation's warheads are aimed, but in whose hands its weapons and skill
end up. 

As
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/d/dem
ocratic_party/index.html?inline=nyt-org> Democrats were quick to note on
Monday, four weeks before a critical national election, President Bush
and his aides never gave as much priority to countering a new era of
proliferation as they did to overthrowing
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/saddam_hus
sein/index.html?inline=nyt-per> Saddam Hussein. 

Mr. Bush and his aides contend that
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritorie
s/iraq/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> Iraq was the more urgent threat, in a
volatile neighborhood. But the North's reported nuclear test now raises
the question of whether it is too late for the president to make good on
his promise that he would never let the world's "worst dictators" obtain
the world's most dangerous weapons. 

"What it tells you is that we started at the wrong end of the 'axis of
evil,' " former Senator Sam Nunn, the Georgia Democrat who has spent his
post-Congressional career trying to halt a new age of proliferation,
said in an interview. "We started with the least dangerous of the
countries, Iraq, and we knew it at the time. And now we have to deal
with that."

Mr. Bush's top national security aides declined Monday to be interviewed
about whether a different strategy over the past five years might have
yielded different results. But Stephen J. Hadley, the national security
adviser, has described the administration's approach to North Korea as
the mirror image of its dealings with Iraq. "You'll recall that we were
criticized daily for being too unilateral" in dealing with Saddam
Hussein, Mr. Hadley said. "So here we are, working with our allies and
friends, stressing diplomacy." 

But at the same time, he said the administration had made a conscious
decision not to draw "red lines" in dealing with
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/_kim_jong_
il/index.html?inline=nyt-per> Kim Jong-il's government because "the
North Koreans just walk right up to them and then step over them," just
to show they can. Other aides say that, lines or no lines, the North
simply decided to race for a bomb - and finally made it.

North Korea announced its nuclear breakout in early 2003, kicking out
international nuclear inspectors and very publicly beginning its drive
to turn its stockpiles of spent nuclear fuel rods into a small arsenal
of weapons. Focused then on the coming war with Iraq, Mr. Bush and his
administration chose to set no limits. 

But foreign policy, as Mr. Nunn says, is "all about priorities," and
until Monday the closest Mr. Bush came to drawing a red line for the
North was in May 2003, when he declared that the United States and South
Korea "will not tolerate nuclear weapons in North Korea."

The
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/cen
tral_intelligence_agency/index.html?inline=nyt-org> Central Intelligence
Agency's estimates in the years since have been that the United States
has been tolerating exactly that - a small arsenal of nuclear fuel
sufficient to produce six or more weapons. 

Notably, Mr. Bush did not repeat that threat on Monday morning. Instead,
he drew a new red line, one that appeared to tacitly acknowledge the
North's possession of weapons. The United States would regard as a
"grave threat," he said, any transfer by North Korea of nuclear material
to other countries or terrorist groups, and would hold Mr. Kim's
government "fully accountable for the consequences of such actions." 

To critics of Mr. Bush's counterproliferation policy, this seemed a
tacit recognition that the North had successfully defied American,
Chinese and Japanese warnings about building weapons and testing them,
and was now simply trying to manage the aftermath. If that is North
Korea's strategy, it can learn from Pakistan, which exploded its first
nuclear device in 1998, endured three years of sanctions, and is now
considered a "major non-
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/nor
th_atlantic_treaty_organization/index.html?inline=nyt-org> NATO ally."

Mr. Bush's aides say that if Mr. Kim believes he, too, can expect the
world to impose a few sanctions and then lose interest in the issue, he
is wrong. "He is really going to rue the day he made this decision,"
Christopher R. Hill, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and
Pacific affairs, said of Mr. Kim on Monday. But Mr. Bush's critics
charge that the threat may be empty. As they see it, Mr. Kim watched the
Iraq war and drew a simple lesson: that broken countries armed with
nuclear weapons do not get invaded, and do not have to worry about
regime change.

"Think about the consequences of having declared something 'intolerable'
and, last week, 'unacceptable,' and then having North Korea defy the
world's sole superpower and the Chinese and the Japanese," said Graham
Allison, the
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/h/har
vard_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org> Harvard professor who has
studied nuclear showdowns since the Cuban missile crisis. "What does
that communicate to Iran, and then the rest of the world? Is it possible
to communicate to Kim credibly that if he sells a bomb to
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/osama_bin_
laden/index.html?inline=nyt-per> Osama bin Laden, that's it?"

Mr. Allison was touching on the central dilemma facing Washington as it
tries to extract itself from the morass of Iraq. Whether accurately or
not, other countries around the world perceive Washington as tied down,
unable or unwilling to challenge them while 140,000 troops are trying to
tame a sectarian war.

Divining North Korea's true intentions is always difficult; there is no
more closed society on earth. But the broad assumption inside and
outside the United States government is that Mr. Kim's first priority is
the survival of his government. And the second is that without a nuclear
weapon, he believes his government would have no way of staving off the
larger, richer powers around it: China, Japan, South Korea and the
United States. 

All have fought over control of the Korean Peninsula in decades past,
and to Mr. Kim's mind, presumably, the prospect that the North could
lash out is the only reason they have stayed at bay.

Mr. Kim may have calculated, many experts believe, that at this point
there is little more that the Bush administration can do to him. The
United States has imposed sanctions on his country since the end of the
Korean War. The new crackdown on the banks through which the North
conducts many of its illicit activities - counterfeiting, missile sales,
trade in small arms - are being choked off, a step the North Korean
leaders presumably see as part of a strategy of bringing them down. 

It may be years, or decades, before historians know whether Iraq played
into Mr. Kim's calculations about when to conduct a nuclear test. But
clearly, managing simultaneous crises around the world is straining the
system in Washington, and posing the Bush administration with more
direct challenges than many believe it can handle at one moment. 

That returns Mr. Bush to the problem he faced when he came to office,
and that his aides have never stopped arguing about: whether the best
way to contain North Korea is to further isolate it, or to draw it out
of its paranoid shell. The nuclear test may force Washington to pick a
strategy. 


 <http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html> Copyright
2006  <http://www.nytco.com/> The New York Times Company 
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